Feb
23
The Top Gear Toyota Hilux (image from carpages.co.uk)
The ethos of “cheap and bombproof” could be grocked almost completely by contemplating the humble Toyota pickup truck.
Across the world, for decades, the inexpensive Toyota truck has been the unofficial official vehicle of the rural Third-world, as well as second and first world inhabitants who require a tough, insanely reliable go-anywhere vehicle. The Land Rover may have originally conquered the Africa bush, but the Toyota pickup has now largely replaced it there. The old Rovers may be easy to repair, but the Toyotas have the advantage of not breaking down in the first place.
If you have a pulse, a vat of vaguely combustible liquid and a Toyota pickup, you can reasonably expect to be able to get around indefinitely.
In Afghanistan, while Taliban leadership were ferried in more luxurious Land Cruisers and Suburbans, the lowly foot soldiers who actually did the fighting drove Hilux pickups almost exclusively, so much so that the trucks picked up the nick-name “Taliwagon”.
While American Special Forces may have not agreed with the Taliban on much else, they did share an opinion on one thing: the Toyota pick-up. SF soldiers reportedly bought up Toyota Tacomas from dealers around Ft. Campbell, modified them slightly with radios and infrared headlights (for night-vision driving) but left them otherwise stock.
(this image and a lot more at Military Toyotas)
Me and My Taliwagon
My personal history with Toyota trucks began when we were living in Los Angeles in the early ’90s. I needed an inexpensive car to bomb around in, and found a 1984 Toyota 2×4 pickup for the bargain price of $2500. It had about 80,000 miles on it but by reputation I knew it could be expected to serve me well for many more.
I drove that car for another 140,000 miles, never ONCE needing to do anything more than routine oil changes and replace dead light bulbs.
Our first dog, Annie, was its nemesis. Annie was a Viszla, a high-strung hunting breed with the cunning, brains and temperament of a Velociraptor. As a puppy, she took to removing the interior of the truck, a proclivity that only grew in later years. Eventually, most of the interior was either bare metal or exposed foam. Half of the protruding knobs in the truck were missing all together, the other half gnawed to stippled plastic stumps.
Her most spectaular attempt to kill the truck, her coup-de-grace, happened one day as she and I were bombing down I-5 at about 70MPH.
She was wearing a cone on her head, one of those big white plastic veterinary jobs to keep her from chewing out some line of stitches or another. She was constantly chasing rabbits through barbed wire, getting in fights with Rotweillers and otherwise tearing the crap out of herself, and probably spent a 1/3 of her life in total wearing her cone.
As we were driving along, all of a sudden my vision was filled with white light. She had seen something out my window and shoved her coned head right in front of mine. I pushed her back onto her side of the bench seat, and noticed that while the car itself was headed straight down the highway, the nose was pointed about 15 degrees to the right. I also noticed a loud tire squealing sound from the back of the truck.
I realized then that she had hooked her cone onto the tree-mounted automatic gear shift and thrown the truck into reverse. Again, FTW, at 70 MPH.
I grabbed the shifter and tried to pull it back into drive. The transmission wouldn’t budge- the full moving mass of the truck had locked the gears firmly in place. We were starting to slow and I could sense other cars all around us. I knew that at some point we’d start to spin and pinball (at best) or roll end over end at worse. I took the shifter with both hands and used all of my weight. It popped back into gear with a huge BANG, and the nose righted itself as I quickly grabbed the wheel.
I gingerly nursed the truck off the highway and tentatively crept around in a parking lot, testing the transmission. It shifted up and down gears, into park and even reverse. I decided it was safe to drive home, which I did without incident. The next day, I took it to our mechanic, who drained the transmission oil in search of transmission chunks or gear shavings. He deemed it not only sound but completely undamaged.
A few years after that incident, the truck began to blow white smoke. I figured it was finally on its last legs and signed its ”Do Not Resuscitate” order. I discontinued all maintenance, including oil changes and decided to just keep driving it on my 60-mile-per-day commute until it finally gave up the ghost completely.
Only the specter of a mandatory emissions test finally drove me to part with it 2 years later. When I started it up for the last time to drive it down and donate it to a local charity, it started up and drove as well as it ever had. I actually cried that evening.
It was replaced with a new, 2003 Toyota Tacoma, my current Taliwagon:
Top Gear
Perhaps the most famous examples of Toyota abuse come from our friends across the pond, the BBC motoring show Top Gear. In 2003, they decided to see how much abuse an old, high-milage Toyota Hilux farm truck could actually take. Over the course of two episodes, they subjected it to increasingly outlandish abuse- driving it into (and through) things, attacking it with a wrecking ball, drowning it in the ocean and lighting it on fire. They finally placed it on top of a building. Then demolished the building.
See it all here, in 3 parts:
Finally, last year, the TG boys decided to drive to the North Pole. Yes- Drive. To. The. North. Pole. What did they choose for the journey? Obviously…
